Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Sunday, March 26, 2006
Make Google Search Categories into Tags?
It is Mashup City over at Instabloke, where Bloke suggests a strategy for adding the rel=tag attribute to Google Blogsearch operators in your post footer. They're crawled as though they're tags, but when you click 'em, they niftily search for other examples of themselves across your blog, and the search results serve as categories. Since the search URL doesn't end the right way to be crawled by T'rati (so why are we adding the rel=tag to it again?), you have to deploy a second stage of nested-link hackery to fool the crawler...

...alright... so now I don't get it..... SkepticRant's method seems a little smoother....

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Posted at 8:52 PM by John.
6 Comments:
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Blogger Blog Bloke said...
"Since the search URL doesn't end the right way to be crawled by T'rati (so why are we adding the rel=tag to it again?), you have to deploy a second stage of nested-link hackery to fool the crawler...
alright... so now I don't get it..."


Hi John. So what part don't you get? Technorati crawls it just fine. In fact it works better than ordinary tags out of the box. I've been using it for months now and it works perfectly so why not give it a try for yourself.

Cheers!

...BB

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Blogger olhares futuros said...
have some txt more easy for me to understand how to do it??

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Not to rain on anyones parade, but I'm pretty sure the format on Skeptic Rants ain't gonna work as Technorati tags. They work fine as links to the google blog search, but they won't also be crawled by Technorati. Just adding a rel="tag" bit to it ain't enough. Technorati figures out what the 'tag' is not by the anchor text, but by the last entry of the href...and the format for a blog search Technorati just won't be able to pick up.

The format on Instablokes will work for both, but because it's really two sets of tags for each, with the Technorati tag being invisible (no anchor text)

Although I don't know about adding those links by hand. I would make greasemonkey or a bookmarklet do the heavy lifting. :-)

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Blogger Blog Bloke said...
No rain over here. Just to make sure that I'm not crazy I used a simplified version of the code similar to what I discuss in Part 1 of my tutorial. Here is my code:

< a href="http://search.blogger.com/?as_q=yourkeyword&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=yourdot.com&x=40&y=10" rel="tag">yourkeyword< /a>

And I posted it from my test site.

Low and behold it works and was indexed by Technorati here. I can't speak for 'phydeaux3' because I never heard of the site before today or used their code but obviously it works for me. It could perhaps all come down to Technorati's notoriously buggy indexing.

So there you have it folks. The proof is in the code.

Cheers!

...BB

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Well BB,

I never said YOUR code wouldn't work as it was, I said it WOULD work since there were really two tags.

I said there would probably be an issue with the OTHER sites code, which only had the one format in a blog search url (that ain't my code, that ain't my site)

As you yourself explain in your own posts on the matter, the format for the blog search url and a technorati crawled url are different, which is why you went to using two tags in the first place right?? You stated yourself in partone and two that getting technorati to correctly index a tag in ONLY the blogsearch url format was sporadic at best.
Which I was agreeing with you!

I think if you want to combine the blogsearch and technorati tags, the way you originally setup is best since it has the format for both done correctly, and will probably work over the long haul more predictably. As you know technorati is notoriously buggy sometimes, even with using exactly their supplied format. But whatever works.

But just to clarify my original comment that you seemed to think meant your method wouldn't work, just the opposite. I said it would work. :-D If you want to trim it down to the one tag and that works for you, then great also. I'm just agreeing with what you said, in your own post about that, the blogsearch url isn't in the format technorati likes to crawl and add to IT's tag index.

So I wasn't contradicting you, I was agreeing with your original two tag format. :-D
If using your new one tag format works for you and everyone else consistently then I'm all for that as well.

Cheers!

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Blogger Sprittibee said...
Hey John! Your blog looks GREAT! :) I'm hopefully going to get a redesign some time in the near future as well. Come by and visit me in a month or so and see.


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